HOUSE OF THE WEEK

An abundance of space at FMI City

CERTAINLY, space is not a problem in this house – once you get there. Over the Hlaing River, 45 minutes from downtown, there is a large one-storey house in a big compound waiting for someone ready to trade time for space. ...more

Yangon Weather Forecast, Burma

Sagaing Fault monitoring to start in February

THE Myanmar Earthquake Committee (MEC) and Earth Observatory of Singapore (EOS) will start a collaborative research project in February 2010 to collect data from southern sections of the Sagaing Fault, which is a major source of earthquakes in lower Myanmar.

According to the MEC, four continuous Global Positioning System (cGPS) stations will be installed along the fault, at Taikkyi in Yangon Division, Inkalay village and Waw township in Bago Division, and Shan Eik Taung in the Kyaikhtiyo area of Mon State.
The sites were chosen based on a preliminary survey conducted last year.

The EOS, which is based at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, will provide equipment and technical expertise to set up the stations.

Researchers from the Department of Meteorology and Hydrology (DMH) will also be involved in the project, with DMH and MEC responsible for maintaining the instruments and collecting data.

The data will be analysed by both parties and shared for the purposes of researching and understanding seismic activity along the Sagaing Fault.

“MEC and EOS have had a general agreement on installing the four cGPS stations since the Satoru Ohya Memorial Workshop was held in Yangon in April 2009,” said U Soe Thura Tun of MEC.

“An MOU will be signed before work starts on installing the stations,” he said. He said research along the Sagaing Fault involves not only monitoring the active fault line but also conducting paleoseismo-logical studies, including digging trenches at key locations to reveal soil substrata. Paleoseismology is the study of geological evidence for past earthquakes.

In the last week of November, Japanese paleoseismologist Dr Hiroyuki Tsutsumi and a team of MEC researchers dug a trench in Kyauktaga township in Bago Division.

U Thura Aung, a senior researcher at MEC, said the trench wall revealed evidence of the 1930 Phyu earthquake as well as older earthquake activity. He said soil samples were collected and sent to Japan for radiocarbon dating, with results to be released in the future.